AustLit

'Where her Orange Prize- winning The Idea of Perfection (1999) was set firmly in present-day Australia, her new novel moves from early nineteenth-century London to an Australia viewed as savage and alien by its white convict settlers: an Australia where Sydney is a rough settlement of a few huts and alehouses, surrounded by almost uncharted waters and unchartable territory. Unchartable, that is, to its new inhabitants. Grenville’s novel is dedicated “to the Aboriginal people of Australia, past, present, and future”, and one of its aims is clearly to revisit the outrages perpetrated by the settlers against the natives of the country. Yet it does so with great subtlety, telling the story from the viewpoint of one of the new arrivals, former Thames waterman William…'  (Introduction)